Betrayal at Krondor - Krondor Confidential - Part I

Learn more about the development of Betrayal at Krondor at Neal Hallfords blog:

“Are you into dogs?”

My boss, John Cutter, had asked the question in total innocence, looking as he always did, a young father with with twinkling eyes and a winning smile. He always had this wholesome vibe, like at any minute he’d jump up to run out into the parking lot to throw around a baseball with a kid…didn’t matter whose. Any kid. It just seemed like that’s who he was born to be, some fellow who would never, never grow up. Peter Pan come to life. Like me, he was a sentimental soul, with a love of Ray Bradbury and an idealized vision of the past. He liked to tinker, and even had a robot in his office. Seated across from him, I sniggered at his question because my brain almost always wanders to the dirtiest possible interpretation to anything anyone says, and this was no exception. In comparison, John always seemed like Ward Cleaver to my Zaphod Beeblebrox.

The question he’d asked had been sparked because we’d discovered that we were both fans of the novels of Dean Koontz, and we talking about how there was almost always a dog in his fiction because he was a dog-lover himself. As am I. I don’t know how John feels about it, but I’ve always thought that people who have and love their dogs are by far much more trustworthy than others. It can be an excellent barometer about character, and it told me a lot about John.

At the time, both John and I were employees at New World Computing in Woodland Hills, California, a far cry from the tiny mountain town of Eugene, Oregon where we’d begin production on Betrayal at Krondor six months later. Neither of us had a relocation on our radars (or at least I didn’t), and the contract with Raymond E. Feist was a long way away, but for me I’ve always regarded that conversation in John’s office that day as the point at which development on Betrayal at Krondor actually began. While the story and game rules would play a critical role in it’s popularity, the real secret of the success of that project lay in John and I’s absolute trust in each other’s judgements and skills. [...]